The leader of a new armed group in Mali’s troubled north said the central government in Bamako could face another uprising of his Tuareg people if it resists pressure to launch long-delayed talks on the region’s future.
Mali exploded into violence when Tuareg separatist fighters tried to take over the north in early 2012. Islamist militants eventually occupied the region, triggering a French military intervention last year that drove most of the militants out.
President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, elected in August 2013, is now trying to rebuild Mali, a vast, landlocked former French colony of 16 million people, with the help of billions of dollars in Western aid.
But critics say Keita’s election promise to build a strong, united Mali is being undermined by his failure to start talks with the Tuaregs, a nomadic people in the north who have rebelled four times since 1960.
The light-skinned Tuaregs say black African governments in Bamako have consistently excluded them from power.
“We would like to give talks a chance and we are asking Bamako to sit down at the negotiating table,” Ibrahim Ag Mohamed Assaleh of the Coalition for the People of Azawad (CPA) told Reuters by telephone from Burkina Faso on Monday.
“If the Bamako government doesn’t want to suffer from short-term memory, it should recall that we took up arms many times since 1963 because they didn’t listen to us.”
wirestory
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